Well, I know a couple of the pieces, just because I alway migrate by hand (2005-> 9.1 ->9.3).

You can define a specific CAM location for a design

<File><CAM>, select 'CAM Directory' and select 'Create' to define a new location for the Gerber plots. This sticks with the design. It shows up in an ASCII export like this:

CAM_DOC_DIRECTORY C:\projects\...\Gerbers (this is from a PowerPCB5.0 ASCII output, so the format may change for other ASCII versions)

As I know it, PADS stores your settings in 'default' files:

default.asc - PCB settings

default.ccf - PCB color configuration settings

default.txt - PADS logic settings

Unfortunately they aren't consistent from version to version, so you can't just copy your settings from 9.1 to the settings folder for 9.3. You need to go through it line by line. I use BeyondCompare for that and it goes fairly quickly.

9.5 looks interesting with the bottom view feature, so I'll try the migrator for the first time when I move to 9.5 (after a service pack or two so I have some confidence in it).

Have you ever used the 'Import' and 'Export' buttons on the 'Define CAM Documents' dialog box? I typically do an export so I know what parameters the job was created with last time. This file works in base units though so I'm not sure if that helps or hurts your English/metric uncertainty.

It still seems odd that you are required to compare the settings between two version of the software to make sure it is still generating the same thing.